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      US whistleblowers say they were fired for raising fair housing concerns

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      Two attorneys in the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) anti-discrimination division said they were fired on Monday, a week after going public with a whistleblower report alleging that the Trump administration had dismantled efforts to combat residential segregation.Paul Osadebe and Palmer Heenan worked in Hud’s Office of Fair Housing (OFH), which is tasked with bringing cases against parties accused of discriminating against tenants and homebuyers under a landmark civil rights law. In a report sent last month to Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, Heenan, Osadebe and two anonymous colleagues wrote that fighting discrimination under the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was “not a priority” for the administration, and that their office had been targeted for downsizing because it presented an “optics problem”.On Monday, Osadebe was called into a meeting with HUD managers, who informed him he was being placed on leave in anticipation of firing. A document he was given cited interviews he had given to the New York Times and Washington Post as violating department policy.“This was purely for whistleblowing activity. There was nothing about conduct, performance, any of that,” Osadebe said in an interview. “They said, this is why we’re firing you, because you spoke out. They are as blatant as can be about it.”Heenan, who was in the probationary phase of his employment, was fired in a similar meeting for “the disclosure of non-public information”, according to a letter he was given by HUD.The department’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate committee on banking, housing, and urban affairs, said in a statement following the firings: “Donald Trump doesn’t want Americans to know that his administration is engaged in a systemic attack on their rights.“So the Trump administration is silencing those who are speaking out about how Donald Trump and Scott Turner [the HUD secretary] are turning their backs on the American people, including women experiencing domestic violence, families being denied mortgages because of the color of their skin, and older folks who need extra help getting down the stairs.”Heenan and Osadebe were recently told they would be moved out of the OFH, which had already lost several staff members and was poised to shrink further through a series of reassignments. Last week, they and three other colleagues sued Turner to prevent the transfers, arguing they were part of the effort to undermine enforcement of the law.“Although we knew we were taking a risk, I am still surprised that this administration would violate the whistleblower statute so blatantly,” Heenan said, referring to federal law intended to protect employees who make reports like theirs.“I’m not going to stop speaking out. I’m not going to stop fighting because these rights are just too damn important.” More

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      West Africans deported from US to Ghana ‘dumped without documents in Togo’

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      West Africans deported by the US to Ghana are now fending for themselves in Togo after being dumped in the country without documents, according to lawyers and deportees.The latest chapter in Donald Trump’s deportation programme, their saga became public earlier this month when the Ghanaian president, John Mahama, disclosed that his country had struck a deal to accept deportees from the region.Eight to 10 west African nationals have since been forcibly sent by Ghana to Togo, bypassing a formal border crossing, and then left on the street without passports.“The situation is terrible,” said Benjamin, a Nigerian national, who said over the weekend he was staying in a hotel room with three other deportees and only one bed, living on money sent from their families in the US.Benjamin – who is using a pseudonym to protect his identity, as he fears persecution from the Nigerian government – said an immigration judge had ruled in June that he couldn’t be deported to Nigeria, citing risks to his life because of his past involvement in politics. He had expected to be released to his wife and children, who are US citizens.He said he was beaten by immigration and customs enforcement (Ice) agents when he refused to board a US military plane headed to an unspecified location, which turned out to be Ghana.Ice did not respond to a request for comment.View image in fullscreenUp to 28 people have arrived in the west African nation from the US so far in the deportation programme.Accra disclosed an initial batch of 14, and Meredyth Yoon, a US-based lawyer, said a second plane that could carry the same amount had since landed, though it was unclear how many people were on it.The initial 14 deportees had won protections in US immigration courts preventing their removal to their home countries for fear of persecution, their lawyers said.But Washington was sending them to Ghana as a loophole, Yoon said – with Accra making it clear people would be forwarded on to their home countries.One deportee, a bisexual man from the Gambia, was immediately sent home by Ghanaian authorities and is living in hiding because same-sex relations are criminalised in the socially conservative country, according to court filings.Two Togolese nationals were deported to the Togo border with Benjamin. They were crying and repeating “It’s over, it’s over”, he said, adding that they had since gone into hiding.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBenjamin and another deportee, Emmanuel – also a pseudonym – said they had spent more than two weeks under military guard in Ghana’s Dema camp, a detention facility in Bundase, 70km (43 miles) outside Accra, with nine other deportees who suffered from exposure to heat, mosquitoes and unsanitary water.The Ghanaian military eventually told them they were taking them to a hotel. Instead, they were driven to the Aflao border crossing on the outskirts of the Togolese capital, Lomé. With the cooperation of Togolese border officials, they were taken “through the back door” of the facility and left on the other side.“We are in hiding right now because we have no type of documents, ID, whatsoever,” said Emmanuel, a Liberian national who arrived in the US in the 1990s during the first Liberian civil war and was granted asylum.Emmanuel and Benjamin had been green card holders, and are married to US citizens. Both were sent to Ice detention after serving prison sentences for separate fraud charges.Emmanuel was fighting his removal in court when he was deported, Yoon said.The UN human rights office has called on Ghana to stop deporting those sent by the US “to Nigeria, the Gambia, Togo, Mali, Liberia or any other third country where there are substantial grounds for believing that they would be in danger of being subjected to torture”.The US state department said: “We will pursue all appropriate options to remove aliens who should not be in the United States.” More

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      Kamala Harris’s election memoir shows just how deluded the Democrats still are | Nesrine Malik

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      Watching the Kamala Harris presidential campaign unfold last year, I remember thinking, and writing, about how striking it was that she had been rehabilitated almost overnight into a political titan. Authoritative accounts of her before that moment portrayed a lo-fi vice-president, who, even according to people who had worked to get her there, had “not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country”. Another striking feature of her campaign was how it leaned into vibes and spectacle rather than substance, or building faith in Harris as a clean break from an unpopular and visibly deteriorating Joe Biden. Her new book, 107 Days, a memoir of the exact number of days she had to win the presidency, goes a long way in explaining why that was. In short, Harris – and those around her, including supportive media parties – got high on their own supply.This was not the intention, but 107 Days is a hilarious book. The kind of “you have to laugh or else you’ll cry” type of hilarity. As the second Trump administration unfolds in ever-more disastrous ways, Harris and the other timeline that was possible had she won take on a calamitous, mythical quality. Here she comes, alerting us to the fact that her defeat was no fateful tragedy, but a farce. There was no hidden, better version of Harris that was muzzled and limited by circumstance. There was only a woman with a formidable lack of self-awareness and a propensity to self-valorise.The book reveals a politician who is all about the machinery of politics, rather than one with conviction spurred by a sense of duty, or a coherent and specific set of values that differentiate her. The “not a thing that comes to mind” answer she gave when asked during the campaign if there was anything she would have done differently to Biden was not caution, but the truth. There is no sign here that she would have liked to meaningfully diverge on Gaza, for example, other than to introduce more parity in the rhetoric of compassion. Or any indication that she would have liked to grasp the nettle on economic policy and make more of her accusation that Donald Trump’s economic agenda “works best if it works for those who own the big skyscrapers”.This dearth of a unique Harris agenda explains why she often seemed so vague, skittish and rambling. How does she receive the news she will be the candidate? By reminding herself (and us) that she had the best “contact book” and “name recognition”, as well as the “strongest case”. She tries to cloak her ambition, saying “knew she could” be president, but only because she “wanted to do the work. I have always been a protector.” It’s fine to have ambition to be the president of the United States! Every cardinal dreams of becoming pope, as Cardinal Bellini of Conclave said. Even he did himself, to his shame, when he lamented upon the discovery of his ambition: “To be this age and still not know yourself.”My abiding feeling reading was: oh God, this was all just as bad as it looked. The celebrity-packed campaign roster was not, in fact, panicked desperation, but the preference of the candidate and her team. They thought that such a range of characters would show that Harris was “welcoming everyone into the campaign” – as if the power of celebrity could do the unifying work of coalition-building, rather than her own programme and politicking. The immersion in the filmic, the celluloid of US politics is so complete that there is a line about Jon Bon Jovi performing for her and it being a good omen, because he performed for a candidate who won in The West Wing. The media loved her. “And behold,” Harris quotes a Washington Post writer, praising her approach to Gaza, “she had her boat through the impossible strait.” Jon Favreau said Harris was “a sight to behold” at the Democratic convention.I lost count of the number of descriptions of crowds exploding, roaring, on fire. The audience applause to Harris’s Saturday Night Live appearance was some of the loudest ever heard. She replays her greatest hits, revealing a politician captured by the reverie of rapturous self-selecting crowds and buzzy studios, fatally unable to connect to the voters outside the bubble, who had soured on the Democrats and were checking out, or voting for Trump.View image in fullscreenBiden pops up often, a self-involved and petty figure, snapping at her heels and distracting her. But she is loyal, she tells us – often. So loyal that she couldn’t disparage him in the way that people needed her to (“People hate Joe Biden!” she is told by a senior adviser). But not so loyal that she doesn’t more artfully disguise that she wants you to know the man was a real drag who mentioned her too late in his speeches, and then called her before her big debate with Trump to unsubtly threaten her if she bad-mouthed him. But what is most telling, and alarming, is what she reveals about the Democratic establishment, and therefore what hope there is of an awakening among its ranks. One that could pose a meaningful challenge to Trump now, and Trumpism in the future. The 107 days were short, but they were a concentration of a process in which the party and its candidate had to dig deep quickly to unearth the most compelling and defining vision for the American people. The result was to take no risks, offer continuity and scold dissenters as Trump enablers, but with style. It wasn’t enough, and will never be.The answer to the question “what went wrong” isn’t “we didn’t have enough time” to establish Harris. It was that Harris, even now, with all the time to reflect and be honest with herself, is a politician who invests too much in presentation, and entirely exculpates herself of failures because she was dealt a bad political hand. What can you say besides, “to be this age and still not know yourself”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

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      Why Trump is backing Argentina’s Thatcherite economics | Heather Stewart

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      “We’re backing him 100%. We think he’s done a fantastic job. Like us, he inherited a mess.” Donald Trump gave his enthusiastic endorsement to Javier Milei’s radical economic experiment when the pair met in New York last week.The US has declared itself ready to offer more than rhetorical support to the chainsaw-wielding Argentinian president in the coming days, as Buenos Aires stands on the brink of a fresh financial crisis.The US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said the US was “ready to do what is needed”. He suggested the Federal Reserve could offer Buenos Aires a $20bn (£15bn) dollar swap line – a crucial crisis-fighting tool – or the US could even buy the country’s bonds directly.US administrations have rallied support for Argentinian governments in the past – Bill Clinton was a fan of Carlos Menem’s 1990s reforms, for example. But Trump’s readiness to wade in directly is the latest example of his determination to use economic tools for political ends: in this case, propping up an ideological ally.Milei swept into power two years ago, on a wave of frustration and discontent with the economic status quo.Like Trump and Boris Johnson, he eschewed the usual conventions of politics and promised to smash up the establishment and remake the state on behalf of the people.But while Milei’s political playbook may echo Trump’s, with its embrace of chaos and showbiz, his economic policies owe something to another radical with big hair – Margaret Thatcher, whom the Argentinian president has called “brilliant”.Like the Thatcher governments in the UK, Milei sees slaying the dragon of inflation as an overriding priority. The challenge in Argentina is on a completely different scale to 1980s Britain, however: the inflation rate peaked at more than 25% a month soon after Milei came to power.But aspects of his approach, including a systematic onslaught on trade union rights, public spending cuts and a wave of privatisations, have echoes of Thatcherism.Despite lacking a parliamentary power base, Milei has succeeded in cutting deep into pensions and public sector wages – and more than 48,000 public sector workers have lost their jobs.He travelled to CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, in the US, to pose on stage next to a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) was partly inspired by Milei’s aggressive style.Argentina’s tough policies have won plaudits from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which granted a new $20bn lifeline to Argentina in April.On stage at the IMF’s meetings in Washington that month, its managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, proudly pinned on to her green jacket a tiny silver chainsaw badge, handed to her by Argentina’s minister for deregulation, Federico Sturzenegger.But while Milei’s “shock therapy” may have met with approval in Washington – and indeed in financial markets – the Argentinian economist and campaigner Lucía Cirmi Obón highlights its human impact.“The macroeconomic changes implemented by Milei have not shown – nor do I believe they will show – any positive impact on people’s quality of life. In practice, what we are seeing is an economic recession,” she told the Guardian.“The main reasons are that real wages fell, and the opening of imports also dismantled a large part of national industry. On top of that, there were cuts to the number of people receiving a pension, support for childcare, for people with disabilities who used to receive pensions. All of the policies the population used to receive from the state have been reduced.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnemployment has risen by two percentage points, but she argues that there is also significant hidden unemployment – with former factory workers crowding into poorly paid gig-economy jobs such as Uber driving, for example. Household debt is rising, and because many of the occupations targeted by cuts are female-dominated, the gender pay gap has widened, undoing six years’ worth of progress.Obón adds that while Milei’s approach was meant to unleash the corporate sector, to open the way for surging economic growth, investment as a share of GDP has actually fallen.Meanwhile, determined to squash inflation, Milei has maintained the peso’s link to the dollar – a trigger for so many crises in Argentina over the years.For several decades, the peso has been pegged – within limits – to the greenback, which circulates within Argentina as an alternative currency, in which many citizens like to hold their savings, especially in times of trouble.Milei had advocated full dollarisation during the election campaign – a policy that would leave Argentina without the right to set its own interest rates. When he came to power and allies rejected that plan, he instead devalued the peso by more than half, willing to wear the resulting inflation in the hope of stimulating exports.But the currency has nevertheless come under continued selling pressure – exacerbated by the political uncertainty unleashed when Milei suffered a disastrous showing in local legislative elections in Buenos Aires province, which he had himself called a “life or death battle”.Since those local elections, and amid a mounting clamour of corruption claims against Milei’s powerful sister, Karina, the peso sell-off has accelerated. The central bank burned through more than $1bn of reserves in a week trying to prop up the currency, before Bessent announced Washington was ready to step in.As well as political fellow feeling, some experts suggest geopolitics may have been another motivation for Washington’s intervention, with China becoming increasingly influential in Latin America.The peso rallied and the markets calmed after Bessent’s comments, but as the costs of “shock therapy” bite and Milei looks to crucial midterm elections in October, the Argentinian public face a volatile period ahead. More

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      Trump fires US attorney who told border agents to follow law on immigration raids

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      Donald Trump fired a top federal prosecutor in Sacramento just hours after she warned immigration agents they could not indiscriminately detain people in her district, according to documents reviewed by the New York Times.Michele Beckwith, who became the acting US attorney in Sacramento in January, received an email at 4.31pm on 15 July notifying her that the president had ordered her termination.The day before, Beckwith had received a phone call from Gregory Bovino, who leads the Border Patrol’s unit in El Centro, a border city 600 miles south of Sacramento. Bovino was planning an immigration raid in Sacramento and asked Beckwith who in her office to contact if his officers were assaulted, the Times reported, citing Beckwith.She informed Bovino that agents were not allowed to indiscriminately stop people in her district, north of Bakersfield, per a federal court order issued in April that prevents the agency from detaining people without reasonable suspicion. The US supreme court overturned a similar court order issued in Los Angeles earlier this month.In a 10.57am email on 15 July, Beckwith repeated her message, telling Bovino she expected “compliance with court orders and the constitution”. Less than six hours later, her work computer and cellphone no longer functioning, she received a letter to her personal email account notifying her that she had been terminated.Two days later, Bovino proceeded with his immigration raid at a Sacramento Home Depot.“Folks, there is no such thing as a sanctuary city,” he said in a video he shared from the California state capitol building.“The former acting US attorney’s email suggesting that the United States Border Patrol does not ALWAYS abide by the constitution revealed a bias against law enforcement,” Bovino said in a statement to the New York Times. “The supreme court’s decision is evidence of the fact Border Patrol follows the constitution and the fourth amendment.”On 8 September, the supreme court ruled that federal immigration agents can stop people solely based on their race, language or job, overturning the decision of a Los Angeles judge who had ordered immigration agents to halt sweeping raids there.Beckwith’s firing is one of a series of federal firings, including of prosecutors who did not abide by the president’s agenda. Last week, US attorney Erik Siebert resigned under intense pressure and Trump replaced him with his special assistant Lindsey Halligan just hours after ordering his attorney general Pam Bondi to do so in a since deleted social media post.Siebert had been overseeing investigations into Letitia James and James Comey. Beckwith has appealed against her termination, according to the Times.“I’m an American who cares about her country,” she told the paper. “We have to stand up and insist the laws be followed.” More

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      Trump says he expects charges for other adversaries after Comey indictment

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      Donald Trump said on Friday that he expected more people whom he considers his political enemies to face criminal charges, a day after the justice department indicted former FBI director James Comey and faced a torrent of criticism for enacting the president’s campaign of retribution.“It’s not a list, but I think there’ll be others,” Trump said as he departed the White House to travel to the Ryder Cup golf tournament. “I mean, they’re corrupt. They were corrupt radical left Democrats.”Trump’s blunt remarks underscored the perilous moment for his political adversaries, given that the justice department pressed ahead with criminal charges against Comey, even though it was widely seen – inside and outside the administration – to be a weak case.The indictment against Comey, filed in federal district court on Thursday in Alexandria, Virginia, alleged that he misled lawmakers in September 2020 when he stood by his previous testimony to Congress claiming he had never authorized anyone at the FBI to leak to reporters.Prosecutors alleged that statement was not true and that Comey had authorized his friend and Columbia law school professor Dan Richman to leak to reporters about an investigation into Hilary Clinton, when Richman worked for a short time as a special government employee at the FBI.But the underlying evidence against Comey, which remains unclear from the two-page indictment, was considered to be insufficient for a conviction. The issues were laid out in a memo and Erik Siebert, the then interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, declined to bring charges.Trump fired Siebert within days and replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, most recently a White House aide with no prosecutorial experience. Halligan was briefed on the problems with the case but pressed forward with charges anyway, presenting the case herself to the grand jury.The grand jury returned an indictment on two counts but declined to approve a third. Even then, only 14 out of 23 grand jurors voted to bring the false statement charge, barely more than the 12-person threshold, court documents show.The fraught nature of the Comey indictment raised fresh fears that Trump’s political appointees at justice department headquarters in Washington and at its field offices elsewhere will feel emboldened to pursue criminal cases against the president’s other adversaries.Among other people, Trump has fixated in recent weeks on criminal investigations against the New York attorney general Letitia James and Democratic senator Adam Schiff over mortgage fraud allegations. James brought a civil fraud case against Trump last year and Schiff led the first impeachment trial.Last weekend, before Comey’s indictment, Trump called on his attorney general Pam Bondi to pursue Comey, James and Schiff. “They impeached me twice and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!” Trump posted on Truth Social.The administration also launched a criminal investigation into former CIA director John Brennan, who Trump despises for his role in the US intelligence community’s assessment in 2016 about Russian malign influence operations aimed at helping the Trump campaign.Last month, the FBI also searched the home and office of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser turned critic, over allegations he mishandled classified documents. The FBI recovered documents with classification markings but Bolton’s lawyer claimed they had been declassified. More

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      Elon Musk and Peter Thiel mentioned in Epstein documents released by Democrats

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      Democratic lawmakers on Friday released documents from the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein that may show interactions between the disgraced financier and prominent conservatives, including Elon Musk, Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel.The six pages of documents made public with redactions come from a batch provided by the justice department to the House oversight committee, which is investigating how the sex-trafficking charges against Epstein, who died in 2019 in federal custody, were handled.Copies of Epstein’s calendar released by the committee’s Democratic minority show a breakfast planned with Bannon, an influential Donald Trump ally, in February 2019. Other schedules mention a lunch with Thiel in November 2017 and a potential trip by Musk to Epstein’s private island in December 2014.A manifest from 2000 for Epstein’s plane includes Prince Andrew, whose relationship with Epstein is well documented, while a financial disclosure the Democrats released shows Epstein paying someone listed as “Andrew” for “Massage, Exercise, Yoga” that same year.Earlier this year, Musk accused Trump of being in the so-called “Epstein files” on social media after the tech mogul criticized Trump’s tax and spending legislation.Then in July, Musk publicly said: “How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?”Pointing to the significance of the latest records’ release, Sara Guerrero, a spokesperson for the oversight committee, said: “It should be clear to every American that Jeffrey Epstein was friends with some of the most powerful and wealthiest men in the world. Every new document produced provides new information as we work to bring justice for the survivors and victims.”Meanwhile, Eric Swalwell, a Democratic representative of California, wrote on X following the records’ release, saying: “Trump OUTS @elonmusk as being in Epstein Files. Revenge for Elon outing Trump? Elon, what do you know about Trump’s involvement?”In response to the latest release, the Republican-led committee took to X and accused Democrats of selectively deciding which records to publicize.“This is old news. It’s sad how Democrats are conveniently withholding documents that contain the names of Democratic officials. Once again they are putting politics over victims. That’s all Robert Garcia and Oversight Dems know how to do. We are releasing them all soon,” the statement said, referring to Robert Garcia, the committee’s ranking member.Garcia, a Democrat of California, pushed back on X, writing in a separate statement: “We don’t care how wealthy or powerful you are – or if you are a Democrat or Republican. If you are in the Epstein documents and files we are going to expose it, and bring justice for the survivors. Release ALL THE FILES NOW!”The documents are the latest in the saga over the government’s handling of the Epstein case.In the House, Democrats have joined with a small group of Republicans on a petition that will force a vote on legislation to compel the release of the Epstein files. The push needs 218 signatures to succeed, which it is expected to soon get after Democrat Adelita Grijalva this week won a special election to an Arizona seat that became vacant when her father died.However, any legislation that passes the House will also need approval by the Senate, whose Republican leaders have shown little interest in the issue. Trump, who has called the furor over Epstein a “Democrat hoax” would also need to sign the bill.The Guardian has requested comment from Musk and Thiel.

      This article was amended on 26 September 2025. The seat won by Adelita Grijalva is in Arizona, not New Mexico, as we originally said. More

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      US supreme court allows Trump to withhold nearly $5bn in foreign aid

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      The supreme court on Friday extended an order that allows Donald Trump’s administration to keep frozen nearly $5bn in foreign aid, handing him another victory in a dispute over presidential power.The court acted on the Republican administration’s emergency appeal in a case involving billions of dollars in congressionally approved aid. Trump said last month that he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a president roughly 50 years ago.The justice department sought the supreme court’s intervention after US district judge Amir Ali ruled that Trump’s action was likely illegal and that Congress would have to approve the decision to withhold the funding.The federal appeals court in Washington declined to put Ali’s ruling on hold, but John Roberts, the chief justice, temporarily blocked it on 9 September. The full court indefinitely extended Roberts’ order.The court has previously cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip legal protections from hundreds of thousands of migrants, fire thousands of federal employees, oust transgender members of the military and remove the heads of independent government agencies.The legal victories, while not final rulings, all have come through emergency appeals, used sparingly under previous presidencies, to fast-track cases to the supreme court, where decisions are often handed down with no explanation.Trump told House speaker Mike Johnson in a 28 August letter that he would not spend $4.9bn in congressionally approved foreign aid, effectively cutting the budget without going through the legislative branch.He used what’s known as a pocket rescission. That’s a rarely used maneuver when a president submits a request to Congress toward the end of a current budget year to not spend the approved money. The late notice essentially flips the script. Under federal law,Congress has to approve the rescission within 45 days or the money must be spent. But the budget year will end before the 45-day window closes, and in this situation the White House is asserting that congressional inaction allows it to not spend the money.The Trump administration has made deep reductions to foreign aid one of its hallmark policies, despite the relatively meager savings relative to the deficit and possible damage to America’s reputation abroad as people lose access to food supplies and development programs.Justice department lawyers told a federal judge last month that another $6.5bn in aid that had been subject to the freeze would be spent before the end of the fiscal year next Tuesday. More